Limbic dominant amnesia neurodegenerative syndrome, or LANS, affects the brain’s limbic system, which helps regulate emotions and behavior.
The syndrome closely resembles Alzheimer’s disease, but does not progress as quickly and has a “better prognosis,” according to a Mayo Clinic news release.
The limbic system is the part of the brain responsible for our behavioral and emotional responses, especially those related to behaviors we need for survival, such as feeding, reproduction, and the fight-or-flight response, or what is known as the fight-or-flight process.
The scientists used data from more than 200 patients from the Mayo Clinic Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, the Foundation’s Study of Aging, and the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative to create a set of criteria that can be used to diagnose “limbic prevalent amnesia neurodegenerative syndrome.”
The team noted that the criteria include factors such as age, brain scans, symptoms of memory loss and some biological markers.
Before these criteria, analyzing brain tissue after a patient’s death was the only way to diagnose the syndrome, said David T. Jones, a Mayo Clinic neurologist and senior author of the study.
“In our clinical work, we see patients whose memory symptoms seem to mimic Alzheimer’s, but when you look at their brain imaging or biomarkers, it’s clear they don’t have Alzheimer’s,” Jones continued.
Understanding the condition will lead to better symptom management and more personalized treatments for patients with this type of cognitive decline, which is different from Alzheimer’s disease.
Until now, there has been no specific medical diagnosis that can be pointed to, but now it can provide some answers for those patients and identify appropriate treatments for them, including amyloid-lowering drugs and new clinical trials, and provide advice about their diagnosis, genetics and other factors.
“In this paper, we describe a different syndrome that occurs later in life. Often, the symptoms are limited to memory and will not progress to affect other cognitive domains, so the prognosis is better than Alzheimer’s disease,” said Dr. Nick Corriveau-Lecavalier, first author of the paper published in the journal Brain Communications.
The team looked into the involvement of one possible culprit, a buildup of a protein called TDP-43 in the limbic system that scientists found in autopsied brain tissue of older adults.
The scientists have classified the buildup of these protein deposits as age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy, or LATE. The team says these protein deposits could be linked to the newly identified memory loss syndrome, but there are other possible causes and more research is needed.
With the clinical criteria developed by Jones, Corriveau-Lecavalier and co-authors, medical practitioners could soon diagnose “limbic prevalent amnesic neurodegenerative syndrome” (LANS) in patients so that those suffering from memory loss can better understand treatment options and potential disease progression, opening the door to further research to shed light on the characteristics of the disease.
Source: Science Daily
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2024-07-23 00:20:00
